Choose Your Own Adventure – SEO For Web Developers: My unified.diff Talk

unified.diff 1st slide screenshot
Last week I spoke at unified.diff, a monthly software/web development meet-up that’s made its home at the wonderful FoundersHub. It was a good and busy crowd.

I was sandwiched between interesting and entertaining talks about the Robotic Operating System and JSON Schema. Additional photos can be found here.

And here are the slides…

For my talk, I decided to challenge myself. I took on the Choose Your Own Adventure format – they were a bunch of books where you decided the journey of the character. Do you climb the mountain (go to pg. 33) or dive into the cave (pg. 38)? You chose the cave? Oh no! You were eaten by a bear! Go back to before that happened (pg. 29), and so on. I remember having a Sonic The Hedgehog CYOA book (in fact, I think it was this one).

When we got to ‘The Grid’ (slide 16), I gave the audience the option to choose the topics. I didn’t want to just choose 3 or 4 and find that a) they weren’t interested in the topics, or b) they already knew everything about the topics, so this way they were able to choose what they wanted to know more about. I utilised PowerPoint’s ‘Link to: Place in This Document’ function, so that each link would leapfrog to the relevant section of the presentation, and at the end of each section, it would link back to The Grid slide. I also chose white as the followed hyperlink colour, so topics that had been chosen/followed would be blanked out upon returning to The Grid.

We only had time for four on the night, which were (in order):

  1. URL Parameters
  2. Canonicalisation
  3. Titles & Metadata Best Practice
  4. Status Codes / Redirects Best Practice

The slide deck above however contains the full set of slides, so for anyone reading this who was at the event and was gutted that I didn’t cover a particular topic, at least you can check out the slides for the other 8 uncovered topics.

Oh and if you’re wondering what slides 4 to 11 are about, it’s a bit of an in-joke with one of the event’s organisers, based on this post. What made it funnier on the night is that he didn’t get the Doge reference right away…

Lastly… It looked as though one of the guys recorded all three talks, so hopefully they’ll all be added to udiff’s Vimeo account. Watch this space. If they do, I’ll update this post and embed it here. Update: …And they’ve uploaded it – yay! Here it is:

udiff-seo from Unified Diff on Vimeo.

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